Just thought we could ramble about this topic. I'm currently still sorta doing pre-production for a personal project, trying to figure out the visual style and how the whole thing could feel like and one of the important aspects to tackle is the camera / scrolling system.

So... I guess everyone here knows Cave Story, right? If not, you can download it here:

What I like about its camera system is that it's not just fixed to the player sprite - it's dynamic and has a nice little drag effect. I like that effect, it's not driven to the point where it can become annoying, but it adds some dynamic, as if the camera tries to follow the character and has to readjust a bit, it makes the whole thing feel a bit more fluid.

So, I've seen some camera threads here already but never quite understood the logic behind their systems. My idea is that you create a camera sprite that is linked to the player sprite and set the system to scroll to the camera sprite - then, if we'd give the camera an expression that emulates this 'drag' effect (so it always drags a bit behind the player sprites movements), we should have what we want, right?

Any thoughts on how to solve this in the simplest, most streamlined way? The effect should be subtle enough to not be annoying to the player, but just to make the whole game a tad more dynamic.

Damn gradients dont render too well with float scrolling positions. I guess thats because they use the bouncing box co-ordinates. If you replace all the gradients with sprites the scrolling looks fine.